Ring Gave Police Stats About Users Who Said No to Law Enforcement Requests
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
I wonder how much of this is just because who's going to believe some random email that "law enforcement" wants to see my security camera footage? We live in an age where the "IRS" calls every day to inform me that they're going to come arrest me, and I'm supposed to hand over surveillance footage to some random email?
About a year ago someone was murdered near my office. Our office is in a townhouse in a mostly residential neighborhood. Detectives came by in person to ask if we had any surveillance cameras that might have footage they can look at to see if it might have the killer on it. They didn't just send an email.
The requests should be done in person in a way that naturally limits it to when it would be required rather than just curiosity or convenience.
But the requests themselves, the requesters, the durations, and the judges that signed off on them should be digitally available.
Efficiently investigating is pretty far down my list of priorities in this context. Accountably investigating, accurately investigating, and norm/right-respecting investigating are above above efficiency, though I'm glad if it can follow those.
Having to contact and converse with the owner who put up the doorbell cam contributes to this. Having oversight from a judge contributes more.
Are they looking for a particular person, or when a blue sedan that may look like yours drove by? Who knows — you should always exercise discretion.
This IMO needs to change, if they can legally lie to you they can lie in court. They do both.
In the trial context, good defense attorneys will be able to introduce contradictory evidence, or will challenge the credibility of a witness by finding facts that make them look bad -- even police officers. With police officers it's a bit harder, though, because the public largely believes (wrongly, I'm afraid) that police are more trustworthy than the general public.
I have heard this discussed in court as a reason to not find the officer guilty. Records get sealed of course and you cant discuss it.
It makes sense. In many cases, subjects of investigations are unaware of them.
You may never have a situation where you wouldn’t want to share camera footage with authorities. But many people do, for a variety of reasons, and creating a norm where your home is a node of some surveillance network has obvious negative potentials.
The whole ecosystem of fear around home surveillance, Nextdoor, etc is awful and companies like Amazon are exploiting it without regard to the impact that it will have.
... For example?
> Creating a norm where your home is a node of some surveillance network has obvious negative potentials
Would you mind explaining what those are? They're not "obvious" to me.
Given the training and conduct this cannot be surprising.
The number of stories where police act in bad faith is overwhelming.
So I get why people would be hesitant to collaborate -- your neighbor might get shot of you report a door left open.
Let's cut the bullshit: if the cops are looking for someone matching your exact description or time+place with minimal doubt, you are probably not doing the "lord's work" as folks from the Southern US would say.
There needs to be high barriers to request this sort of data.
There should be low barriers to auditing the use/misuse of it.
Ring is building a global surveillance network and using dark patterns to get homeowners to pay for it.
It's amazing how hard it is for people to grasp that I don't know who they are.
Would be great if there was a national database of law enforcement officers' name and badge numbers, that typing in both with a match would show any member of the public an official image of the officer's face. I'd love to be able to authenticate whether someone is a cop before letting them into my home: fake badges are cheap.
Similarly, would be cool to have a facial recognition database, so a citizen could take a picture of a cop's face to lookup name and badge number if they are a real cop, or report impersonation of an officer if they are not found.
I suspect not.
Look at the stats provided to LE: there were a grand total of zero refused requests. Instead, all the requests were either approved (small minority), or ignored (all the rest). The requests were sent by email. Perhaps the users simply didn't see the emails. Most likely, they went into the Spam folder. Or the users are so inundated with other junk and other email (that makes it past the Spam filter) that they just didn't notice them. Maybe the users don't even look at their email very often.
Has Ring done any research to see if their emails are getting into their users' Spam folders?
Seriously, email these days isn't the greatest communication tool any more, thanks to the spammers. GMail does a pretty decent job of filtering, but not everyone uses it. Look how many clueless people still use their ISP's crappy email service!
As for the IRS, you're right about that: all the spam/robocall/scam calls have basically ruined voice calling on phones. I almost never answer my phone any more unless it's someone already in my contact list, because it's usually someone I don't want to talk to (and if it's from my own area code, it's almost always a scammer).
Do you have any better alternatives?
> GMail does a pretty decent job of filtering, but not everyone uses it.
Yes, anyone not using Gmail is completely inundated with spam every second of every day, is a troglodyte, and how do they even survive? As the posted article shows, the best thing for everyone is to hand over all of our private information, communication, and GPS coordinates to the big tech oligopolies.
Edit: correct silly wording
> Has Ring done any research to see if their emails are getting into their users' Spam folders?
How would you do that without putting tracking pixels/images/scripts/anything inside of an email?
Inconceivable!
getting a permanently funded government agency as an advocate for your thing is a great startup play: you'll easily crush competitors and roll your way into an enshrined monopoly because "we cannot possibly lose this valuable tool against criminals everywhere"
In my experience it wasn't a horde - just one man - but I needed it all the same.
* Own a gun and kill oneself with it. The primary risk factor being depression, not the gun.
* Own a gun and be part of a criminal organization. The primary risk factor being rival criminal organizations, not the gun.
https://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Documents/UDHR_Translations/en...
Article 4: No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
I could continue pasting the remainder of the document, but I would argue that the ability to defend oneself (from the State, or other individuals) is the fundamental human right. Without it, all other rights are null and void. Gun ownership is the final fallback for securing our human rights.
A great way to get a head or spine injury is to own a ladder.
A great way to maim yourself is to own a circular saw.
A lot of popular sports have a substantial risk of very predictable injuries, from CTE (caused by repeated head trauma) to joint damage.
People accept all sorts of risks from sports activities or (mis)use of all kinds of tools. When the subject turns to guns there's this uncontrollable fear reaction certain people have and want to get rid of the object. They don't want guns. They don't want their family to have guns. They don't want their friends to have guns. They don't want anyone to have guns. Guns are evil and must be eradicated. They cannot be tolerated and anyone who has one is suspicious if not a verified homicidal maniac.
There is no magical solution to the "gun problem", just like there's no magical solution that will keep everyone safe in sports or DIY home improvement. Every "solution" that would work involves some kind of extremely harsh and limiting regulation or outright ban that, if it could be enforced, would upset a lot of people.
How do you know every single one of your friendly, stable, normal, and non-violent friends doesn't own a gun? 30% of adults in the U.S. own one. 50% live in gun households. If you don't live with them, you simply don't know.[1]
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own...
The three things you can do which will reduce your odds of being killed by a gun by about 95%:
1. Don't shoot yourself. That reduces your odds by nearly 70%
2. Be Asian or Native American. This reduces your odds by another 70%. If you're not able to do that, being white or Hispanic still improves your odds substantially.
3. Be a woman (reduces your odds of dying by another 80%)
If you are able to accomplish all 3, congratulations! You've reduced your odds being killed by a gun from .01% to around 0.0005%
If you're able to understand basic safety rules, owning a gun is not that dangerous. Accidental deaths are incredibly rare (literally less than a one in a million occurrence), and have been trending down since gun safety has become more popular (the modern conception of trigger discipline has only existed for like 40-50 years). I think you're conflating the inherent danger of firearms with some confounding variables that lead certain people to be more likely to possess them.
You can't shoot yourself if you don't have a gun.
> Be Asian or Native American. This reduces your odds by another 70%. If you're not able to do that, being white or Hispanic still improves your odds substantially.
It doesn't matter what race you are, if you don't have a gun.
3. Be a woman (reduces your odds of dying by another 80%)
If doesn't matter what sex you are, if you don't have a gun.
> If you are able to accomplish all 3, congratulations! You've reduced your odds being killed by a gun from .01% to around 0.0005%
If you don't have a gun, congratulations! You've reduced your odds being killed by a gun from .01% to around 0.0005%. And you have to worry a whole lot less about dying from a gunshot depending on your mental state, accident, or whether you are "unlucky" enough to have been born male or African-American, or have occasional bouts of severe depression.
> The best way to increase your odds of getting shot is to own a gun. Owning guns is dangerous. Occasionally for some people it will turn out to be a positive, but in general, owning a gun is a negative.
Among other issues such as full data never being released, the specific quote you have there was derived from police reports where someone was shot in their home. No other factors were considered like drug or spouse related, not if the home owner was shot by their gun, or any one of a number of other factors that would paint a better picture.
Do you seriously think police reports where someone was shot no other questions asked is a good indicator for gun ownership in the USA?
The CDC has been able to and has studied guns since that 1996 law.
They have not been allowed to suggest policy changes.
Interestingly when the ability to weaponize them went away, a lot less direction went into gun studies compared to the millions of dollars spent in the ramp up to 1993.
Would you be okay if the CDC couldn’t suggest policy changes when it comes to nicotine?
What’s the purpose of studying something if you can’t do anything with the results?
Anyone pushing for policy is free to cite the CDC results of studies. As they have done.
But if you notice, the narrative has been CDC isn’t allowed to study guns which is a lie.
This was partially rolled back by an Obama EO (sorta, its complicated) and you know what ever CDC study since has found? No exact correlation to guns and crime. There have been some interesting results since 2013 like the fact that Assault Weapon Bans have not at all proven effective since less than 400 people have died per year in any recent time by rifles of all types let alone the subset of scary looking ones, that there are 500,000 to 3,000,000 successful defensive gun uses by citizens a year mostly where a shot isn’t needed compared to 10-15,000 homicides in the country of 330,000,000 are over 75% gang or drug related, and that rural areas of USA where the guns are have effectively the same homicide rates as rural Europe when you look at like for like causes of the violence.
Specifically the CDC was barred from having tax payer money used to remove citizens civil rights.
Last I checked there was no enumerated right to asbestos or nicotine.
It wasn't perfect, but you're talking millions of dollars that went into the 92/93/94 push. That's hard to come up with for narrative building when it's not tax payer money. Just look at the single source of gun control in the USA today, Michael Bloomberg, if he wasn't personally bankrolling it, things would look a lot different.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/tech/2018/12/...
"“Haselton said that his wife usually keeps the gun locked up in fear that he might shoot somebody,” Jacobs wrote in the report. “Haselton stated that he despises and hates those cars (Waymo) and said how Uber had killed someone.”
Haselton's wife told officers he was diagnosed with dementia, according to a police report."
It's illegal in America for private citizens to own automatic weapons manufactured after [some date - 1984?]. Since gun manufacturers thus can't sell them such weapons, they have no interest in making people want them.
You want motivated consumers screaming for your products, and large segment of keeping the 2A in place is reminding consumers that "if you don't have access to guns, bad people will do bad things that could have been prevented".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21348242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21348730
This is not someone who is informed about the topic.
It had no effect.
The prohibition target the manufacture of such weapon for civilian market past 1984. As such, there is naturally a very high demand for a very low offer, and prices are astronomical, IIRC about $20k for a pre-1984 M-16 receiver. If you have the money to buy a such receiver and your state law do not prohibit you from owning the weapon, go ahead, fill the ATF paperwork, wait 6 months, and enjoy your full-auto M-16. With more paperwork, you can even shot it as a full-auto suppressed SBR. 100% legal.
He of course fails to consider that this will simply make guns more un-affordable from the poorest Americans. Those people tend to live in the worst neighborhoods where police respond poorly, and therefore often need them most.
Too late?[0,1] PGFs (Precision Guided Firearms) will take a picture, and help you aim too. They even have apps for your iPhone. Like how CA has a tech focused start-up culture, TX has something of a gun focused start-up culture [2]. IRL aim-bots have been around for ~6 years now, though those companies tend to snatched up by the DoD pretty quickly, so it's tough/expensive to acquire.
[0] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23571-self-aiming-rif...
[1] http://www.tracking-point.com/
[2] Can MA give us an education focused start-up culture? Maybe NC a health care focused one?
>The IVAS Prototype Project seeks to provide a HUD 3.0 and integrated STE Squad capability within the Squad Architecture in support of Army, Marines, and Special Operations Forces within 24 months. The PPA shall deliver a baseline standalone STE Squad capability within 12 months, and STE Squad capability integrated into HUD 3.0 within 24 months. This complete IVAS capability shall be suitable to begin production as early as 4Q20 to ensure clear overmatch in Close Combat engagements and drastically increase Squad Lethality.
That method does not handle factors that cause the bullet's trajectory to not be perfectly straight or flat, such as wind, gravity, Coriolis Effect, etc. They're generally sufficient for short range shorting, but at longer ranges a large part of the skill comes in being able to adjust your sights to compensate for those factors.
Gun sights are also somewhat ineffective because they are only usable from a single position. You can't point the gun around a corner or lift it over the top of something you're hiding behind and still use them unless you expose your head as well. This method would change that and might give you some kind of a camera feed to a HUD that shows where your bullets would hit.
Not useful for civilian life, but I can understand army interest in it.
Edit: yes I'm totally wrong which is why city police departments constantly fight against gun control. /s
The phrase "I don't approve of what you're doing but I'll defend your right to do it" comes to mind.
Things like the push for 2A Sanctuary Cities may be pandering, but I think it wouldn't be happening if the cops in question were strongly against civilian ownership of firearms.
>Throughout the late 1960s, the militant black nationalist group used their understanding of the finer details of California’s gun laws to underscore their political statements about the subjugation of African-Americans. In 1967, 30 members of the Black Panthers protested on the steps of the California statehouse armed with .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns and .45-caliber pistols and announced, “The time has come for black people to arm themselves.”
>The display so frightened politicians—including California governor Ronald Reagan—that it helped to pass the Mulford Act, a state bill prohibiting the open carry of loaded firearms, along with an addendum prohibiting loaded firearms in the state Capitol. The 1967 bill took California down the path to having some of the strictest gun laws in America and helped jumpstart a surge of national gun control restrictions.
They are typically not sourced well enough for an independent confirmation.
This has been a relatively non inflammatory discussion.
No, but ironically, he is committing an invasion, against everybody. To himself he's a disciplined warrior defending his precious family against the forces of chaos. To me he's a poorly-trained, hysterical coward willing to pollute the entire world and fill it with guns and surveillance cameras pointed at ME on behalf of his family about whom I'm not obliged to care in the slightest. God forbid I should be in that neighborhood if I'm black or "acting weird" in accordance with my god-given rights. What are this random guy's criteria and thresholds for threat assignment? With the police, I know what they are or could find out. And ostensibly they're trained for each thing. So yeah, ironically, as little as many people trust the police, they're still way more trustworthy than this guy.
And lastly, perhaps anecdotally, I've never ever seen anything to the effect of that message outside of tongue-in-cheek internet forum shitposting. Firearms manufacturers are highly feature-oriented in their marketing, with some generic patriotic bells and whistles if anything. What you wrote is just a gross caricature of the motivation and practice of self defense.
There are only four people who should be coming into our house without us letting them in and they all have the code to our alarm.
This comment is one reason why it's so hard to discuss firearm issues, one side is completely emotional and has no understanding of the facts or current laws.
The only uproar about “taking them” that I have heard in the past decade was about taking away guns in general.
It really depends on the machine gun in question. Transferable Mac 10s are sufficiently common and lame that they're still under $10k. (That hardly invalidates your overall point, even 'cheap' transferable machine guns are still expensive.)
Storing it locally is absurdly more efficient and ... actually compatible with having security unlike blindly sending the footage to a third party.
Why have we normalized this absurd behavior?
If the NAS is outside of your home, where do you put it? Only the 1% own multiple homes and asking your parents or friends to hold it would just be...weird and complicated.
And then you'd need to keep a separate NAS in your home, for the camera pointed at the NAS in your parent's house of course.
Suffice it to say, it kind of makes sense to let Ring store all of the video in one central location since they can just hire armed guards to keep it safe. If you yourself can afford armed guards, you're probably not in their target market.
There are LOTS of reasons why you'd want redundant off-site backup.
Ring can hire all of the armed guards in the world, and it won't protect your data from Ring.
With the density of modern storage media, the secure box could be quite small, much smaller even than a typical residential safe. And it needn't necessarily be accessible like a typical safe. If you design it right, it needn't even have a door that could be pried open with sufficient leverage.
It could at the same time be disguised. It could be bolted to a concrete wall, covered with a fake electrical conduit box (which would help disguise the wires going into it), then completely covered over by drywall. To find it you'd need to gut the house, and in the unlikely event that the thief found it they'd still be left with a hard nut to crack.
It's not even expensive. I have a couple of NASes in my home, but it would take a pretty intensive search to find them -- certainly more than a thief has time for. (I don't hide them to keep them from thieves, I hide them to keep them out of sight and out of the way for aesthetic reasons.)
But that convenience comes with a cost.
That aside, I am pretty sure that in ‘typical’ consumer deployments, cutting power and/or cable from a house will disable and debilitate most alarm and security systems.
What the user was actually doing on their home VPN be largely opaque to the ISP. They might be able to make educated guesses like "this much traffic over this period of time looks a lot like somebody streaming a movie off their NAS", but that's pretty crude. I'm not sure they could really monetize that sort of data.
On the other hand home VPNs being common would probably increase the how much uploading the average user did. These sort of residential connections are almost always asymmetric because ISPs are counting on people downloading far more than they upload. By empowering users with home VPNs, the balance of upload/download might be upset in a way that isn't profitable for the ISP.
As for upload amounts, you are probably uploading less data, not more, because you don’t have to upload 100% of the data to the cloud to access 1% of it on demand.
If a device manufacturer could count on you having VPN access to your home network they could make it trivial to set up and use. You’d open an app or visit a URL, log in, and you’d have access.
I think that any solution that includes a VPN is going to lose out in convenience even slightly against a solution that doesn't, and in a market where convenience and ease of use goes above all else, it would just not work.
No, it really isn't difficult without the cloud. All the cloud does is make it a bit more convenient.
It has good margins and could afford to market heavily and invest in feature development vs anything else. As a result an alternative might well be great for users, great for the world, and also an unsuccessful business.
Doubly so because it's essentially already solved. Setup a standard NVR and portmap it. The marginal gains are just in making it more secure (few care, obviously, or ring wouldn't exit) or a little easier to configure.
I'm not sure how meaningful that actually is. I know that it's reasonably easy because I've done it a number of times, but I have zero interest in making a productized solution.
It's not the easiest solution but the trade-offs are necessary.
Likewise with the poor state of router security.
2) Keep the associated private key protected to your preference of security and convenience.
3) Decrypt the videos when you want to view them (if you're comfortable storing the private key on your phone, the only difference to the end user should be lag -- unless they lose the private key).
That's what I did for a friend. We hid it in a kitchen cabinet behind canned items and ran a VGA cable to the living room TV on the other side of the kitchen wall. No one would know it was there.
or 7-zip encrypt video chunks and upload using above method.
In both cases, you can control the server and the data. You can hand over data that is applicable to the period of time in question and you still have your local copy.
Or even just if the power or internet was out. The whole point of these things is to be able to see what's going on when something unexpected happens.
If the power is out the camera is out (unless it's on a UPS, in which case the storage can be too...).
If the internet is out your cloud storage is out-- this is a problem that a local solution doesn't have.
Ring isn't a "third party", they're the party from which users (of which I am one) buy the cameras and the services that go with them.
One of the services is being able to see live views from your cameras, or watch stored videos, from anywhere through the app. This is very useful if you're away from home. Storing videos locally wouldn't support that.
Of course it is--don't fall for the okeydoke. Encrypt with a passphrase. Provide the same passphrase in the app. Ring's central server exists only to pull streams on-demand and route them directly to the app. Ring can still even store VOD data if you really want; they don't have the ability to perpetuate the panopticon through it, though.
There, I fixed it.
Are you saying Ring already offers this capability?
Yes, it would be slower, would require video encoding/rescaling near the local storage, but it would actually be secure that way.
How do they do that if the app is halfway across the country? They have to go through a common server.
But let's go ahead and go with your assumption that they are. You can still have a secure connection from your doorbell camera to a mobile app anywhere in the world. Both your app and your camera connect to an intermediate server. This server merely acts like a proxy, passing packets between the two. Using a standard TLS handshake, the app can establish encryption with the camera without the proxy in the middle being able to decrypt the traffic. When the camera is initially setup, it can generate a TLS certificate that the app can download and pin (Since the app and camera will be on the same Wifi network), so that the proxy server can't try to present its own and intercept the communications.
If you need me to go into greater detail, I can. But this is definitely a solved problem.
EDIT: Another way to think of this...apps like Signal and Wire let people talk to each other by each client connecting to a central server to send and retrieve messages, but without the ability for those central servers to intercept the contents of the messages through public key encryption. The camera-to-app connection would work basically the same way.
Sure it does.
The Internet is a global wide area network that connects computer systems across the world.
Perhaps you got confused and thought that the internet only connected you to Amazon? :)
Smarm aside, I really wonder how you ended up thinking this?
You're not the only person I've encountered that seemed to think cameras had to upload 'to the cloud' to be useful. E.g. after posting cute animal footage from my cameras ( https://people.xiph.org/~greg/troups.webm ) I got a number of comment from people along the lines of being surprised that I'd hand footage of my home over to amazon which made no sense until I found out about how ring worked.
This is quite surprising to me, because the bandwidth involved and the requirement for working internet connectivity makes remote storage seem really costly and unattractive to me and I was surprised to learn that's what products like ring were doing.
Please save your patronizing for someone else.
> You're not the only person I've encountered that seemed to think cameras had to upload 'to the cloud' to be useful.
I've explained exactly what I think the issue is, and a number of people have given useful responses. You haven't.
If the camera doesn't have internet connectivity, I can't see what it's seeing when I'm away from home. That's a requirement, as I have already said.
But they also keep recording while my internet connectivity goes out.
My cameras in aggregate also produce a lot more data than my internet connection could support-- about 180mbit/s during the day-- but that presets no problem for remote viewing because I only few a couple cameras at a time remotely. (I also can view the much lower bitrate substreams, while the full resolution is recorded locally.)
Having all of your cameras constantly uploading stuff to someone else's computer so that you could use your own client device (presumably, a smartphone) to look at a copy of stored videos (or a live feed) from someone else's computer? Wouldn't it be a bit more efficient to skip a step and stream straight from a computer within your home?
It really boggles my mind why anyone tech-savvy would not only agree to this ineffective approach, but also pay a monthly subscription for that service.
Not if I'm away from home and can't talk directly to that computer because it's behind a firewall and my ISP won't let me run Internet-visible servers using my home Internet connection. (And even if the ISP would, while I, as a techie, might be willing to set up my own streaming server and poke a hole in my firewall for it, I'm not sure the average user would be able or willing to do that.)
> It really boggles my mind why anyone tech-savvy...
I wasn't talking about average users.
> and my ISP won't let me run Internet-visible servers using my home Internet connection.
I'll give you that one. I know that Google Fiber has an exception for such use cases. From: https://support.google.com/fiber/answer/2659981?hl=en&topic=...
> However, personal, non-commercial use of servers that comply with this AUP is acceptable, including using virtual private networks (VPN) to access services in your home and using hardware or applications that include server capabilities for uses like multi-player gaming, video-conferencing, and home security.
I know that other ISPs in the US are somewhat shittier in this regard.
Looks like my cameras, all outdoor, average about 7mbit/sec each-- most of my cameras are 2 or 4mpixel ones though the number is inflated by a couple 12mpixel wide angle cameras. I'm sure I could tune the bitrate a bit more if I tried, but already I turned them down until just before there was a noticeable reduction in face intelligibility at the end of their range.
Yes. Plus ISPs (or at least US ones) won't allow you to run an Internet-visible server using your home Internet connection.
That's not entirely the case. I've been running internet-visible servers from home for decades. My current ISP (Comcast) doesn't have a problem with that, even contractually, as long as you aren't running publicly available services, and I've never had a problem with any of my prior ISPs.
Most ISPs don’t seem to care if you’re not using a ridiculous amount of bandwidth. Many will sell you a package that explicitly allows it. I currently have access to live view and recorded video from my security system and haven’t had any problems at all.
In the case of wide adoption of such a thing I imagine the ISPs either offering a more expensive package, or clamping down and offering their own version of the service through some monstrosity of a modem/router. It’s probably the latter that motivates most of these companies to use “the cloud”. There’s certainly ways around the problem for a motivated company, though.
The ToS says you can't, but it isn't enforced.
1. https://reason.com/2019/08/09/no-probable-cause-required-for...
Additional points of concern:
https://boingboing.net/2019/08/06/ring-ring-snitchphone-2.ht...
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43kga3/amazon-is-coaching...
edit: Read as who agreed not to share.
In that case, hopefully 0% agreed to share.
Police can subpoena this information if they want it. They will if they need it for a prosecution. This whole practice is all about saving Amazon money on discovery requests. If there's a serious event they'll canvass neighborhoods and look for cameras anyway and approach you directly.
There are obvious issues with participating in something like this. The rules can change at any time, and you might find yourself in a pickle if you meet some vague description at a particular time of the day.
Until it isn't.
All it takes is one person holding out in a neighborhood with a child kidnapping for enough hysteria to build for this to become legislated as mandatory.
If someone who lives across the street from a Ring door bell, hasn't given permission to be filmed by Ring/their neighbor/etc, shouldn't they have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" on their own property?
And the camera owner can extrapolate when OP/their family members are home or not, when people visit, etc, etc. Could that not be considered surveillance?
Observation of public space is not "abuse" in any way.
If I set up a camera to do the same, why is that better? People are constantly recording their neighbors' comings and goings, their visitors and associations, and sending that data to a bureaucratic megacorp that actively cozies up to law enforcement. "Observation of public space" is reductive, that's a cyberpunk nightmare. It's poisonous to free society.
It's subject to change without notice, and your continued use is implied acceptance.
AFAIK The NetGear Arlo system is pretty good and doesn't sell your data to the cops.
It has a shitty app but instead I just pull the HD RTSP stream over the network into my DVR. Also integrated with Home Assistant for notifications and remote viewing.
A good option for the technically-minded who want no sketchy remote access.
https://www.amazon.com/Uniden-U-Bell-Doorbell-faceplates-DB1...
They are resold under many names: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07888LWLM/ref=cm_cr_arp_mb_b...
Their regular cams are only $19.99, and I've been very happy with them so far. If they do a doorbell, that's definitely the way I'll be going.
I think we still lack a common set of definitions and expectations in the public discourse to wrestle down what people really want out of privacy controls vs. what is practical to provide.
This latest round of govt skirting around the 4th has me looking to replace it with a closed circuit system I control.